Maran 2007

Sign Systems Studies 35.
1/2, 2007
Towards an integrated
methodology of ecosemiotics:
The concept of nature-text
Timo Maran
Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu
Tiigi 78, 50410 Tartu, Estonia
e-mail: timo.maran@ut.ee
Abstract. The aim of the article is to elaborate ecosemiotics towards practical

methodology of analysis. For that, the article first discusses the relation
between meaning and context seen as a possibility for an ecological view
immanent in semiotics. Then various perspectives in ecosemiotics are
analyzed by describing biological and cultural ecosemiotics and critically
reading the ecosemiotic works of W. Nöth and K. Kull. Emphasizes is laid on
the need to integrate these approaches so that the resulting synthesis would
both take into account the semioticity of nature itself as well as allow
analyzing the depiction of nature in the written texts. To this end, a model of
nature-text is introduced. This relates two parties intertwined by meaning-
relations — the written text and the natural environment. In support of the
concept of nature-text, the article discusses the Tartu–Moscow semioticians’
concepts of text, which are regarded as broad enough to accommodate the
semiotic activity and environment creation of other animals besides humans.
In the final section the concept of nature-text is used to describe nature writing
as an appreciation of an alien semiotic sphere and to elucidate the nature
writing’s marginality, explaining it with the need to interpret two different
types of texts.
For understanding the paradigm of ecosemiotics and its methodolo-

gical possibilities it would be useful to start with a wider perspective
and to consider possible relations and similarities between semiotics
and ecology. The development of ecology as a discipline and the
proliferation of semiotics in the mid-twentieth century can both be
seen as expressions of the same wave of systemic thinking in
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270 Timo Maran
twentieth century science. Also cybernetics, general systems theory,

and a large part of structuralism belong to the academic movement
that draws attention to the structure and behavior of systems, and
distinctions, influences, interrelations, and equilibriums in these.
Ecology as a scientific discipline has remained faithful to the research
objects and methodologies of natural sciences but has later itself had
various ramifications for humanities, for instance for environmental
psychology, ecocriticism, green studies, cultural ecology and environ-
mental aesthetics, which have also shaped the intellectual atmosphere
for semiotic studies.
Besides this general relatedness in development, some inner
similarities between semiotics and ecology can also be found.
Although semiotics has mostly focused on human sign activities and
ecology has typically studied the life of other biological organisms,
both are largely disciplines of relation, accustomed to consider their
objects as relational or in relations with other objects and phenomena.
They both consider such relatedness to be fundamentally important. In
ecology the focus is on relations between organisms and their
environment or on relations between different biological species. In
semiotics the classical concept of sign itself expresses a certain type of
relation: a sign “is something which stands to somebody for some-
thing in some respect or capacity” (CP 2.228). There is also intuitive
resemblance between Peirce’s idea of unlimited semiosis as series of
successive interpretations (CP 2.228; 1.339), and recurrent processes
in nature: change of generations, food chains and substance cycling as
understood in ecology. A beautiful connection from ecological
relations in nature to semiosic processes in language is established by
W. John Coletta using Peircean notions of metaindex and metaicon
(Coletta 1993). Similarly Peter Grzybek develops a semiotic view on
human epistemogenesis where homologous spheres of human self
(microcosm) and nature (macrocosm) become mediated and reflected
by the sphere where culture and nature mingle (mesocosm) (Gryzbek
1994). Connections between semiotic and ecological processes can be
elaborated quite far, as it is done for instance by Roland Posner, who
introduces the concept of semiotic pollution, as noise or disturbance
that interferes “with sign-processes as much as material pollution
interferes with the fundamental processes of life” (Posner 2000: 290).
Posner considers the factors of communicative processes (sender,
Towards an integrated methodology of ecosemiotics 271
recipient, context, channel, etc.) to be “semiotic resources” (Posner

2000: 294–296).
The question about ecosemiotics as a possible semiotic paradigm
was raised by Winfried Nöth and his colleagues in the journal
Zeitschrift für Semiotik a little more than a decade ago. Although this
initiative was followed by some discussion, there is no reason to talk
about ecosemiotics as a full discipline with wide research activities
and an institutional establishment.1 Compared to the discipline of
biosemiotics, which also gained ground in the 1990s, but which has
led to the establishment of an international society, regular publication
of a thematic journal, and to regular conferences, ecosemiotics
remains quite clearly in the background. The present article is written
with the understanding that the ecosemiotic paradigm has a lot of
unused potential. In the following pages I examine the different paths
to ecosemiotics and try thereafter to formulate some methodological
grounds and tools for studying texts that represent nature. Although
the primary focus is on nature writing (understood as including essays
and other non-fictional texts written about the natural environment
(Maran, Tüür 2001; Tüür, Maran 2005), the proposed approach should
also be usable for the analysis of other cultural texts, where nature is
an important topic.
Contextualism as a common ground

for semiotics and ecology
An interesting semiotic concept regarding relations to ecology is

context, which can be understood as “the circumstances that form the
setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be
fully understood and asserted” (Pearsall 1998: 396). In ecology, a
quite similar role has been given to the concept of environment as “the
surroundings or conditions in which a person, animal, or plant lives
and operates” (Pearsall 1998: 617), and which also have influence
upon it (Lawrence 1989: 163). The concept of context has many forms
and uses in semiotics. For instance in the semiotics of communication
the contextual thinking may appear as an idea that the meaning of the
1
The largest collections of ecosemiotic studies published so far are probably
thematic issues of journals Zeitschrift für Semiotik 15(1/2), 1993, Zeitschrift für
Semiotik 18(1), 1996, and Sign Systems Studies 29(1), 2001.
272 Timo Maran
message transmitted in communication is directed outside of the

communicative situation and toward the context. Marks of such an
approach can be found already from Karl Bühler’s organon model of
language communication, which distinguishes expressive function
directed to the sender, appealing function directed to the receiver, and
representative function that is directed to circumstances, objects or to
the surrounding world (Bühler 1934: 34–37). Also the classical com-
munication model of Roman Jakobson asserts the relation between
meaning and context by claiming that the referential function of
communication is directed to the context (Jakobson 1981: 21).2
The question of context and its influence on semiotic processes has
in different forms been essential to many distinguished scholars who
have been active in the border areas of semiotics. One of the best-
known contextualists, British language philosopher I. A. Richards
stresses the relevance of context in the determination of linguistic
meaning. He writes:
The effect of a word varies with the other words among which it is placed.
What would be highly ambiguous by itself becomes definite in a suitable
context. So it is throughout; the effect of any element depends upon the other
elements present with it. (Richards 1938: 178–179)3
From another angle Eugene Nida has emphasized the importance of

context in translation processes. According to his views, meanings of
the words and texts can only be communicated in relation to specific
culture, and in this process, context has the essential role. To describe
the effect of context on the text, Nida distinguishes different types of
contexts such as syntagmatic and paradigmatic context, context
2
According to Jakobson, context must be either verbal or capable of being
verbalized, i.e. accessible to the receiver. Although Jakobson’s referential function
should rather be understood through the indexicality, in the sense that
communication itself distinguishes its context by referring to it, the openness of
the communicative situation toward the surrounding world is still relevant
regarding the possible ecological potential of semiotics.
3
A similar position is represented by a semiotician of the younger generation –
Yair Neuman, who, based on the works of Valentin Voloshinov, describes com-
munication as a recursive and hierarchical system that cannot be efficiently
understood just by the descriptions of the syntactic forms of representation: “as far
as natural language is concerned, the context of the whole utterance determines
the meaning of the components and vice versa in hermeneutic circularity”
(Neuman 2003: 52).
involving cultural values, context of a source text, etc. (Nida 2001:

29–41).4
Contextual thinking has also served as a basis for the works of
interdisciplinary scholar Gregory Bateson: “all communication neces-
sitates context, […] without context, there is no meaning” (Bateson
1980: 18). Contextual information may introduce redundancy to the
communicational system, but there may well also exist several
contexts, contexts inside contexts for the given message. Bateson’s
understanding is also a relevant point for his Double Bind theory,
which describes the condition where contexts of different levels are in
contradiction for some recurrent communication thus bringing along a
schizophrenic situation, where the participant does not have the pos-
sibility to give the correct response nor any way out of the situation
(Bateson 2000: 206–207, 245). In relation to biological evolution
Bateson has also written about the environment as context, which
evolves as a response to animal activities (Bateson 2000: 155).
Bateson has been rather critical toward the Darwinian understanding
of a single individual or lineage as a unit of survival and has argued
that the evolutionary unit should be a flexible organism-in-its-
environment (which is comparable with the connectedness of the mind
with the larger system of pathways and messages outside the body,
Bateson 2000: 456–457).
The concepts of context and contextualism seem to serve as
possible ground for relating semiotics with ecology. When Thomas A.
Sebeok starts to establish his zoosemiotic research platform in the
1960s, he uses transmissional communication models (Shannon-
Weaver, Bühler, Jakobson — see Sebeok 1972b: 13; 1972b: 65) as
one of his starting-points. Probably following these, Sebeok links the
semantic dimension of communication with context, understanding
the latter as information related to functional status, ecological
relations and external environmental conditions of animals (Sebeok
4
In relation to the natural environment Eugene Nida gives an example with
many ecosemiotic associations — the word run, whose possible meanings depend
on our knowledge of different animal species. For instance sentences “the boy is
running” and “the horse was running” are different since the legs of quadrupeds
move differently from those of the human. In the sentence “the salmon is
running”, the situation is much different because the physical context of moving is
water and instead of legs there are fins and flippers. But in the wider context the
last expression signifies the vast numbers of salmon swimming upstream to their
spawning sites (Nida 2001: 31–32).
274 Timo Maran
1972b: 15; Sebeok 1972b: 80). According to Sebeok, contextual infor-

mation has critical importance in semiotic studies of animal
communication.5 The meaning of the perceived message in animal
communication can be completely different, depending on whether the
communication takes place in the territory of the sender or receiver,
whether it takes place in open or closed and safe environment,
whether participants are approaching each other, withdrawing or
holding a constant distance (Sebeok 1990: 112). At the same time
Sebeok emphasizes that there are few studies about the use of
contextual information in animals.6 One reason for this is the
inaccessibility of the code and the meanings of messages of other
living beings for the researcher of animal communication (Sebeok
1972c: 132). In the zoosemiotic works of Thomas A. Sebeok the
linkage between meaning and contextual information becomes directly
related with the environment in nature and the semiotic research of
nature.
Different perspectives in ecosemiotics
Semiotics and ecology have come into contact with each other at
several points and the origins for designing the paradigm of
ecosemiotics differ accordingly. In the introduction to the thematic
issue of the journal Sign Systems Studies, Winfried Nöth and Kalevi
Kull distinguish two principally different approaches to ecosemiotics.
The cultural theoretic approach proceeds from semiology and
structuralism, primarily from the legacy of Ferdinand de Saussure and
emerges in the writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Juri Lotman, Umberto
Eco, and Algirdas Julien Greimas. It investigates to what extent nature
is interpreted from a cultural perspective and to what extent various
cultures interpret the same natural phenomena differently. The second
5
Even more emphasis is given to the concept of context by theoretical biologist
W. John Smith. He contrasts it with the notion of signal, and includes in context
almost everything in communication, which remains outside of the message.
Smith divides context into direct and historical context, where the first includes
state of the receiver and the other messages perceived during the same
communication. Historical context includes previous experiences of the receiver
and its species-specific properties (Smith 1965).
6
A comparative overview of the use of context in human and animal communi-
cation has been given by Pietro Perconti (2002).
approach proceeds from the tradition of general semiotics of Charles

S. Peirce and Charles Morris, is present in the works of Thomas A.
Sebeok, and treats semiosic processes in nature as phenomena in their
own right (Kull, Nöth 2001: 9). The outcomes of the latter approach
are the paradigms of zoosemiotics and biosemiotics and the process in
semiotics that Winfried Nöth describes as the lowering of the semiotic
threshold (see Nöth 2000). These approaches can also be seen as
possible answers to the epistemological question: can culture’s
methods be used to study relations with something that lies outside the
borders of culture? Winfried Nöth has described these two alternative
routes to ecosemiotics concisely as cultural ecosemiotics and
biological ecosemiotics (Nöth 2001: 72–74).
In addition to these two approaches one more intellectual develop-
ment should be distinguished that has considerably influenced the
shaping of ecosemiotic ideas. Namely, the activities of researchers
with a background in natural sciences, who include a semiotic per-
spective in ecological studies of organism-environment relations. This
approach is applied for instance by an influential German theoretical
biologist Günter Tembrock, who has conceptualized relations between
an organism and its environment at different levels. Tembrock
elaborates his theory of biocommunication (Tembrock 1971) towards
semiotics and distinguishes semiotic types of relations between orga-
nism and environment as spatial semiosis, temporal semiosis, semiosis
of metabolism, defensive semiosis, exploratory semiosis and semiosis
of partners. Tembrock sees these distinctions also as basic types of
semiotic relations between humans and their environment (Tembrock
1997). Another predecessor of ecosemiotic thinking is systems
ecology where information processes are considered to be crucial
constituents of ecosystems regulation (Patten, Odum 1981; for
semiotic interpretation see Nielsen 2007). From contemporary authors
who have brought semiotic methods into ecology, Almo Farina and
his colleagues should be mentioned. Farina’s concept of eco-field
introduces Jakob von Uexküll’s umwelt-theory into landscape eco-
logy. Eco-field should be understood as:
the physical (ecological) space and the associated abiotic and biotic characters
that are perceived by a species when a functional trait is active. [...] The eco-
field can be considered the interference space in which the mechanisms for
collecting, concentrating, stocking, preserving and manipulating energy are
active. (Farina, Belgrano 2004: 108)
276 Timo Maran
Many other authors have used a semiotic approach in ecological

research as well (see Manning et al. 2004; Claval 2005; Vladimirova,
Mozgovoy 2003).
Also Winfried Nöth’s own approach, when he outlines in 1996 the
possible paradigm of ecosemiotics, seems to originate rather from the
themes that ecology has dealt with under the name of autecology for
many decades. For Nöth, ecosemiotics is first of all semiotics of
habitat, the aim of which “is the study of the semiotic interrelations
between organisms and their environment” (Nöth 1998: 333). The
important research questions for Winfried Nöth concern the relation-
ship between organism and the environment:
Is it always of a semiotic nature, or is there at least always a semiotic aspect in

this relationship, or do we have to distinguish between semiotic and non-
semiotic environmental relationships? (Nöth 1998: 333)
In a later article, Winfried Nöth specifies the position of ecosemiotics

in relation to biosemiotics and zoosemiotics by writing that, in
contrast to these, ecosemiotics should focus on the process of
signification (as a sign process without the participation of the sender,
in contrast to communication), i.e., semiotic relations between an
organism and its nonliving environment (Nöth 2001: 72). Thus Nöth’s
ecosemiotic views lead towards the autecology that has been described
as “the biological relations between a single species and its environ-
ment; the ecology of a single organism” (Lawrence 1989: 45).7
Another author who has written in more depth about ecosemio-
tics — Kalevi Kull — seems, according to Nöth’s distinction, to
belong rather to the tradition of cultural ecosemiotics. Kull’s inspira-
tional article “Semiotic ecology: different natures in the semiosphere”
published in 1998 can be regarded as expressing a cultural semiotic
view because of the following statements.
(1) Differently from the comprehension of Winfried Nöth, eco-
semiotics does not deal with all living organisms in their relation to
the nonliving environment, but solely with humans, their culture and
relation with the natural environment (Kull 1998: 348).
7
Ecology has been classically divided into branches of autecology (corresponds
to the level of organisms) and synecology (corresponds to the level of commu-
nities of species). Sometimes also the concept of demecology (corresponds to the
level of population or species) has been used.
(2) Kull defines ecosemiotics explicitly “as a part of the semiotics of

culture, which investigates human relationships to nature which have a
semiosic (sign-mediated) basis” (Kull 1998: 351).
(3) Man cannot perceive nature without it having first been mediated
or filtered by language. Nature in itself (0 nature) and nature that is
categorized by language (1 nature) form clearly distinguished types
(Kull 1998: 355, 356).
(4) Culture that comes into contact with nature cannot avoid changing
nature by describing it and acting upon it (Kull 1998: 347, 359). This
change is in principle uni-directional; the development of human
umwelt leads unavoidably to the diminishing and degradation of 0 and
1 type natures at the expense of humanized nature (Kull 1998: 347,
356).8
Kalevi Kull’s distinction of four types of nature, which has been
derived from Jakob von Uexküll’s model of the functional cycle, has a
potential to become a grounding principle for ecosemiotic theory.9 In
practical research such typology can be used as a methodological tool
for analyzing different forms of mediating nature in culture, or
different degrees of nature’s culturization, which for instance in land-
scapes lead to the development of natural, semi-natural and cultural
plant communities (see Kull 1998: 359). At least in one study, Kull’s
typology has been used in practice as the research method for
analyzing Estonian folk medicine and the different ways in which
8
Similarly to Kalevi Kull also Alf Hornborg emphasizes the ability of the
human sign system to influence and change ecological processes. In his overview
of the environmental relations of Amazonian native people he distinguishes three
subsequent types of sign systems regarding the transformation of nature as
sensory, linguistic and economic (Hornborg 2001).
9
Kalevi Kull explains the distinction of four types of nature as follows: “Zero
nature, at least when living, is changing via ontological semiosis, or via
physiosemiosis if applying J. Deely’s term. The first nature is nature as filtered via
human semiosis, through the interpretations in our social and personal knowledge.
This is categorised nature. The second nature is changing as a result of ‘material
processes’ again, this is a ‘material translation’ in the form of true semiotic
translation, since it interconnects the zero and the first (or third), controlling the
zero nature on the basis of the imaginary nature. The third nature is entirely
theoretical or artistic, non-natural nature-like nature, built on the basis of the first
(or third itself) with the help of the second” (Kull 1998: 355). In later
conversations Kalevi Kull has stressed that the distinction between four natures
should rather be understood processually as different strategies by which nature is
generated.
278 Timo Maran
herbs are used in it (Sõukand 2005). At the same time it seems that
Kull’s approach is more corresponding to passive nature (although he
uses also several examples involving animals) and is applicable
foremost for analyzing relations between humans and inanimate
nature, plants or landscapes. This becomes more apparent when we
compare Kull’s typology with some typology of bilateral relationships
such as the one developed by Thomas A. Sebeok to describe possible
relations between humans and animals. Thomas A. Sebeok distingu-
ishes situations where human is destructor of the animal, human is the
victim of the animal, human is the parasite of animal or vice-versa,
animal accepts human as its species-mate and so on (Sebeok 1986:
107). Compared to Sebeok’s typology, Kull’s approach seems to focus
more on the human counterpart and to describe one direction of
transmission of messages in communication.
According to Kull the goal of ecosemiotics is the
research on the semiotic aspects of the place and role of nature for humans,
i.e. what is and what has been the meaning of nature for us, humans, how and
in what extent we communicate with nature” (Kull 1998: 350) [my
emphasis — T. M.]
The other participant of this relation, nature, does not have any active
role in this process. For instance, describing nature and dealing with it
makes nature, according to Kull, become more human-like, but
involvement with nature cannot make culture become more nature-
like. Likewise, nature that has once been described and changed has
few possibilities to revert back to its original state (as such possibi-
lities, Kull mentions the ability to forget, and cultures that do not rely
on long-term memory techniques (Kull 1998: 364–365), but even this
possibility arises from the peculiarity of culture rather than from the
active involvement of nature). In short it seems that applying
Uexküll’s concept of functional cycle to culture-nature relations may
lead to the attributing of the status of “subject” to human culture and
the status of “object” to nature, where for the latter there does not
remain any voice or right for expression outside mediations by the
human sign system.
Both biological and cultural ecosemiotics have their theoretical
strengths and weaknesses and research topics in which their use is
appropriate. For the formation of a viable ecosemiotic tradition we
would need, however, the synthesis of the two. Both approaches in
themselves are limited in their ability to describe culture-nature

relations. Biological ecosemiotics leans toward the tradition of natural
sciences or, in the better case, towards biosemiotics and becomes
mostly interested in theoretical descriptions of sign relations between
living organisms and their environment. Cultural ecosemiotics is on
the contrary grounded in cultural semiotics, and is therefore bounded
by language centrism or by culture centrism and is not capable of
shifting the researcher’s point of view beyond the limits of human
language and cultural system.
The need to overcome this dichotomy between the cultural and
biological approach in ecosemiotics has been vigorously expressed by
Riste Keskpaik:
In the tradition of cultural ecosemiotics ‘nature enters the semiotic scene only
as a referent (or content substance) of language […]’ (Nöth 2001, 73).
Biological ecosemiotics relies on the assumption that semiosis occurs in
nature irrespective of the knowledge of it. In my opinion the ecosemiotic view
only emerges at the crossing of the two perspectives; irreducible to either of
them it transcends the linear, dichotomous logic. (Keskpaik 2004: 53)
Only then can ecosemiotics aspire to fulfill its most significant task:
“to help to diminish communication problems between human and
nature, because from that viewpoint it becomes possible to speak
about nature, as it seems to us in culture, and to speak with nature,
because its ability of speech has been restored” (Keskpaik 2003: 50).10
The role of ecosemiotics understood in such a way would be to
connect, mediate and translate different sign systems and structural
levels of semiotic systems in culture-nature relations, to recognize and
explicate possibilities for categorization, textuality and meanings in
animate nature, and to bring forth natural, animal and nonverbal
aspects of human culture and its texts. For the practical research
methodology such an approach would bring along the need to take
into consideration changing viewpoints between culture and non-
culture and different levels of semiotic description, to combine
research methods of texts with those of natural science; but also to
introduce a phenomenological perspective that allows the researcher
to combine his/her participation as an intelligent being in the world of
10
“Aidata vähendada kommunikatsiooniprobleeme inimese ja looduse vahel,
sest sellelt vaatekohalt osutub võimalikuks kõnelda nii loodusest, kuidas ta meile
kultuuris paistab, kui ka loodusega, kuna talle antakse tagasi tema kõnevõime”.
280 Timo Maran
text and culture with his/her participation as a living being in the

world of nature and its immediate perceptions and meanings.
Nature-text as a methodological concept for ecosemiotics
On the level of practical analysis the necessity to integrate two

branches of ecosemiotics should result in the formation of research
methodology that allows both the representations of nature in culture
and nature in its own semiosic activity to be covered. The perfect
model object for such a twofold framework of analysis is nature
writing. A nature essay includes the author’s imaginations, social,
ideological and cultural meaning relations and tensions, but it also
embraces organisms, natural communities and landscapes with their
special properties and abilities to grow, communicate, learn and
multiply. The understanding of nature writing does not depend solely
on interpretation of the written text, but also on structures of outer
nature, which have their own memory, dynamics and history, and if
those outer structures change, then the field of possible interpretations
for the written text will also change. The object of ecosemiotic
research should therefore also be considered to be twofold: in addition
to the written text that speaks about nature and points to nature, it
should also include the depicted part of the natural environment itself,
which must be, for the relation to be functional, to at least some extent
textual or at least textualizable.11 I will call the unit that is formed
through meaning relations from those two counterparts nature-text
(Figure 1).
The relations between the written text and natural environment
operate similarly to the relation between two interconnected texts or a
text and its context, where the interaction significantly shapes the
possible interpretations of the text. The relation here is complementary
in the sense that the text does not need to convey all meanings, as they
are present in the environment and familiar to the reader. Pointing to
them is often enough. Correspondences between the written text and
textual nature can also be structural (e.g. a sequence of a text
11
Compared to the written text, the structure of the natural environment and its
perception is multimodal. Therefore natural environment and written text do not
relate as two equal counterparts, but the relation corresponds rather to a one-to-
many relationship.
following a nature trail), but there is hardly one-to-one correspon-

dence between the two entities. Rather, the written text is contrasted
with a space of possible structures and meanings that could exist in the
depicted natural environment. In nature there is simultaneously taking
place a multitude of parallel events or stories that do not form a linear
sequence, but occur in various media and sign systems.
Figure 1. Nature writing conceptualized as nature-text: components and inter-

relations.12
In order to appear and become related with nature writing, the

meanings of nature need mediation by human semiotic processes.
Therefore the author of the written text and the reader should also be
included in the model of analysis, which in that case becomes
quadripartite: (1) textual natural environment; (2) written text; (3)
author of the text; (4) reader. Every participant is characterized by its
own semiosic activity, and relations between participants are not fixed
but form a specific pattern in each and every case. The reading
experience of a nature essay may become the cause for the reader to
visit the depicted natural environment, but it may also well be the
other way round — the reader is first familiar with the natural
environment and then becomes interested in nature writing. The
reading experience of a nature essay can differ according to the
reader’s familiarity with the depicted region: whether the reader lives
12
Following Mikhail B. Yampolsky’s terminology (see below) nature-text can
be understood as a set of physically justified meaning connections between text
written in a conventional language and the natural environment.
282 Timo Maran
in the region or does not have any personal experience with the place.
Also, if nature writing is usually associated with the inspiration
acquired from the natural environment and with the attempt to share
appreciation toward nature, then this is not so in all cases. In the
tradition of Estonian nature writing an incident is known where the
environment became endangered because of a written text. A story
was written about a mineral island in Muraka raised bog, praising its
quietude and beauty, and the story became so popular and provoked
such intense interest in the readers that their increased visits
eventually damaged the place (see Kask 1995: 50–53).
Meaning relations between a written text and natural environment
may also have different intensity. Written text may be open and
include descriptions of the author’s experiences of different places as
well as various cultural and literary references. But a nature essay can
also be a closed text that relates to some specific place in such a way
that it is not possible to understand it fully without knowing the
depicted place. Because of the specific relationship with the local
environment, nature-text is characterized by locality, understood as
“the characteristic of semiotic structures by which they merge into
their surroundings in such a way that they cannot be separated from
their environment without significantly altering their structure or
information contained in this structure” (Maran 2002: 70). This
property of nature essays may become noticeable for instance during
the process of translation, where references in the text to the local
natural environment may show remarkable resistance to the trans-
lator’s efforts.
Arguments for including natural environment

in the analysis
Such a theoretical approach to nature writing may raise questions as to

what is the essence of this other part that remains outside of the
written text, and on what grounds can this natural structure be taken as
a part of an object for semiotic research. These questions are
connected with our capabilities to become related to and to interpret
nature, both as humans in our everyday practices and as researchers on
a meta-level. Some answers to these questions can be found from the
tradition of Tartu semiotics. In general, in the Tartu–Moscow semiotic
school not much attention was paid to the natural environment.

Semiotics in Tartu developed as a part of the European semiological
tradition and thus considered literature and culture to be its primary
research object. Also the distinction between culture and things
outside it, which became one of the central constructs of the Tartu–
Moscow semiotic school, probably impeded a constructive approach
to the physical environment. In some interpretations of Tartu–Moscow
semiotics this distinction has also been expressed as the opposition of
culture and nature (Sonesson 2000). At the same time, another central
concept of the Tartu–Moscow semiotic school, the notion of text, was
understood so generally that in certain conditions it could also include
some parts of the natural environment. Juri Lotman and his colleagues
understood the notion of text ambivalently and broadly, defining it not
by written form or linear structure, but rather on the basis of operating
and functioning in culture. Text is something that has specific
meaning from the point of view of the carrier of culture and has
integral function from the point of view of the investigator of culture
(and it is thus simultaneously the concept of the object level and meta-
level; see Ivanov et al. 1998: 65). Such view allows national costu-
mes, pieces of music and paintings to be considered as texts, given
that these are used, understood and valued in culture. Also parts of the
natural environment can act as texts if there is a custom in the given
culture to interact with nature’s structures in a way that they become
distinctly meaningful in culture.13
In Estonian culture the existence of many semi-natural plant
communities such as wooded meadows and coastal meadows (that
persist only with the mild but continuous influence of human culture,
see Kull 2001), strong tradition of nature writing and nature films, and
rich folklore about natural phenomena give evidence about the
culture’s practice to be meaningfully related to the natural environ-
ment (for overview, see Maran, Tüür 2005). Such valuation of nature
13
Anti Randviir distinguishes in his article “Loodus ja tekst: tähenduslikkuse
tekitamine” between speaking about nature as text metaphorically and texts that
exist in nature. Into the latter category, Randviir puts phenomena that can be read:
“read in the sense that because of our (cultural) experience we can set some limits
of interpretation to them and can very probably evaluate their semiotic nature (and
origin) [lugeda selles mõttes, et me oskame tänu oma (kultuurilisele) kogemusele
neile seada mingisugused tõlgenduspiirid ning oletada küllaltki suure tõe-
näosusega nende märgilist päritolu (ja märgilist loomust)]” (Randviir 2000: 141).
284 Timo Maran
could also be the best proof that, at least in Estonian culture, it is

reasonable to consider the natural environment as a textual entity.
A representative of younger generation of the Tartu–Moscow
semiotic school, Mikhail B. Yampolsky has written about natural or
physiognomic text that is expressed as relations between the part of
culture that is fixed into conventional language and the real world.
Such text is created according to Yampolsky in the language of
physically justified connections. He notes that interpretation of natural
or physiognomic text is problematic, because of the absence of an
effective code for reading (Yampolsky 1989: 62–63). At the same
time it seems that for the semioticians of the Tartu–Moscow school, a
phenomenon in culture does not need to be decoded or even decodable
in order to acquire the status of text:
utterances circulating in a collective but not understood by it are attributed

textual meaning, as occurs with fragments of phrases and texts brought from
another culture, inscriptions left by a population that has already disappeared
from a region, ruins of buildings of unknown purpose, or statements
introduced from another closed social group, for instance, the discourse of
doctors as perceived by patient. (Lotman, Pjatigorskij 1977: 129)
Natural environment is similar to foreign cultural texts, which are

imported or carried over from another culture, or to historical texts,
which have been long forgotten and then retrieved. In the case of
foreign cultural texts a specific addresser may be unknown, their code
is often unfamiliar and as such they tend to bring along cultural
polyglotism (see Ivanov et al. 1998: 44); the same seems to apply to
nature as text. Meaningful relations with the natural environment often
take place in the form of a communicational situation where the
specific addresser is unknown or is absent altogether, or where addres-
ser and addressee are principally different by belonging to different
species.14
Here it is relevant to introduce the argumentation by British educa-
tion theorist and semiotician Andrew Stables according to which, in
14
Similarly to the endeavor of the present article to use the concept of text for
studying culture–nature relations, Kalevi Kull has also recognized the need to
widen the notion of text proceeding from the Tartu–Moscow semiotic school. In
biosemiotic paradigm he has proposed the term biotext, understood as an
organism’s ability to interpret sign processes taking place inside itself (Kull 2002:
329–332).
modern literary theory the position of author is anyhow blurred and

that makes it possible to open the concept of text up also to natural
phenomena. Writings by Roland Barthes, Hans-Georg Gadamer and
others have engendered the view that instead of personal authorship
the meanings of texts are socially or culturally constructed. Stables
notes, that in landscapes the network of shared meanings extends
beyond human sphere and that it is difficult to make a distinction
between the creative activities of humans, other life forms and natural
forces (Stables 1997). From such a viewpoint, natural environment
can be understood to be a result of common creative activity,
“written” by individuals of many different species, each proceeding
from their own sign system, umwelt, and life activities. Some of those
authors, such as beavers and ants shape landscape to a remarkable
degree and make changes that influence the habitats of many other
species, humans included. Also tracks of wild animals in the
landscape, which connect drinking places, feeding areas, and resting
places, are part of environmental scripture. Although the descriptions
of such changes in the environment and the names of animals that
have caused these are attributed by human culture, one must admit
that ant nests and beaver dams in themselves are the creation and self-
expression of animal authors.
In many cases the living activities of different organisms merge in
the environment in a way that makes it very difficult to distinguish the
contributions of different species in it. As such, nature becomes a
medium or interface, which different living beings read and where
they write into. The example of such collective creation of environ-
ment is forest. Life cycles of different organisms in forests combine in
complicated ways; some species form habitats for others, the decay of
some organisms becomes food and source material for others, and so
on. Forest is full of information and communicative relationships,
which, related to the topic of this article, brings up the question of
how people read forests, what aspects of it they are able to interpret
and how.
To understand the specific interpretation and communication
practices that humans use for communicating to and relating with
nature, the concept of zoosemiotic modeling by Thomas A. Sebeok
may turn out to be useful. Sebeok presented this model as a criticism
of the distinction of semiotic modeling systems made in the Tartu–
Moscow semiotic school. As is well known, the Tartu–Moscow
286 Timo Maran
school has considered natural language to be the primary modeling

system. Complex cultural phenomena (literature, art, music, film,
myth, religion) are regarded as secondary modeling systems, because
these are derived from and built upon natural language (e.g., Lotman
2000: 47–48). Thomas A. Sebeok has argued against such categori-
zation, claiming that natural language is both ontogenetically and
phylogenetically preceded by yet another modeling system — the-
world-as-perceived, where signs are distinguished by the organism’s
species-specific sensory apparatus and nervous system and aligned
with its behavioral resources and motor events (Sebeok 1988: 73–74).
According to Sebeok, humans possess two mutually sustaining
modeling systems — the anthroposemiotic verbal, which is unique to
the human species, and the zoosemiotic nonverbal, which unites us
with the world of nonhuman animals. The existence of a primary
zoosemiotic modeling system is hard to notice for humans, because
we are born into it (which makes it self-evident) and also because it is
later to a large extent overwritten by the system of conventional
meanings. The existence and properties of the-world-as-perceived
become, however, more apparent if the perceptual possibilities and
communication systems of different species are studied. Direct and
spatial perceptions, tactile and olfactory sensations as well as many
occurrences of nonverbal communication between humans belong to
the sphere of nonverbal modeling. Language resources are often
insufficient for describing these kinds of phenomena, but it is certainly
possible (and this is often done) to express these kinds of sensations
by textual means.
Concerning nature writing such view regards writers and readers as
two-sided creatures: as cultural beings, we are capable of cognition,
language and literary expression but on the other hand as biological
organisms, we are capable of immediate perception of natural
phenomena through our senses and of participation in the nature’s web
of relations and meanings. As embodied sensual creatures we humans
communicate with other living beings and natural environments by
means of sounds, sights, scents and touches, bodily movements and all
corresponding perceptions. As intellectual beings we are able to
discern and describe these sensations, to convey and valuate these in
writing. The distinction between two modeling systems has also an
inner dimension in the form of understanding our own bodily proces-
ses and verbalizing these. Mental states with biological background,
such as anxiety, fear, affection and fury are also important motives for
literary imagination. The questions about one’s own inner feelings,
desires and phobias, that can be summarized as a quest to understand
one’s inner nature has been a backbone for many classical novels.
Nature writing that relates to immediate environmental experiences
is probably the most suitable material for studying traces of such
zoosemiotic modeling. The attention of the researcher can turn here to
the perceptual properties of humans as biological species, to the ways
how one can relate perceptually and bodily with the environment and
to the possibilities to express these experiences. Zoosemiotic
nonverbal modeling enables communicative relations between humans
and animals, as it relies on biological foundations that are common to
humans and many animals (Sebeok 1990). Similarities, which make
the occurrence of meaningful relations between humans and animals
possible, lie in morphology (bilateral symmetry, positions of limbs,
body and face), perception (concordance in sense organs, communi-
cation channels and diapasons), basic needs and dispositions (need for
food, water, shelter, avoidance of accidents, pain and death), being
subjected to the same physical forces (gravity), inhabiting the same
environment and relating with it, etc.
Nature writing as regarded through

the concept of nature-text: some ethical implications
If we agree with the arguments given above that it is reasonable to

consider natural environment as being textual and related to written
texts, then this may lead to some questions about the effects that this
new type of relation may have on nature writing and its research.
These implications apply to some degree also to other texts of culture
that develop close contact with natural environment such as nature
documentaries, folk knowledge about the nature, environmental art
and others. First, it seems that understanding nature writing in the
framework of natural environment, written text, author and reader
opens up new possibilities to define nature writing. This is so because
of the changed position of nature writing — a written text that is
related through meaning relations to a part of natural environment,
carries out two processes: it communicates nature and at the same time
it values nature through that communication.
288 Timo Maran
During each writing act choices are made among alternative

experiences, reflections, imaginations, and ideas and the results of
those choices are fixed in the linear sequences of words. This is
especially so because of a multitude of events, stories, perceptions and
sign systems present in nature compared to the relatively constrained
scope of a nature essay. As these choices made determine what will
and what will not be communicated in human culture, writing activity
inevitably becomes decision making concerning the values in culture.
At a higher cultural level also, nature writing as a phenomenon can be
seen as a possible value decision of culture. By changing individual
experiences of the author to become a part of wider experience of
culture, nature writing becomes a strategy for regarding and valuing
nature. Writing about nature is simultaneously a recognition that
nature as such is worth writing and talking about. If nature is under-
stood as being composed of various umwelten and semiotic spheres,
which are foreign and partly inaccessible to humans, then every nature
essay turns out to be an attempt to raise these natural foreign semiotic
spheres above the interpretation threshold of human culture.
Therefore, according to the concept of nature-text, nature writing
could be understood as an aesthetical expression of the appreciation of
the foreign semiotic spheres of nature.
Another conclusion that can be derived from regarding nature
writing as nature-text relates to the position of nature writing in
culture. This thought can be expressed as the combination of genera-
lity and specificity (also as a combination of intelligibility and
unintelligibility) of nature essays. Existence of intense meaning con-
nections between the written text and the natural environment
determines significantly the possibilities for interpreting nature essays.
On one hand the strong relationship with the processes and pheno-
mena of the natural environment makes the structure of the nature
essay more predictable than it is in belletristic writings. Movement in
nature, encounters with different animals, names and descriptions of
various organisms, their life and behavior, climate conditions,
seasonal changes and personal recollections of experiences in nature
are the most common elements for compiling nature essays.
On the other hand the adequate interpretation of the nature essay is
only possible if the reader has a nature experience that is at least to
some extent similar to that of the author. If the nature experience of
the reader is very different from that of the author or is absent
altogether, then many meaning connections that point in the written

text to the natural environment remain inaccessible to the reader. The
marginal position of nature writing in contemporary culture (as is the
case in Estonian culture) seems to derive from that peculiarity of
nature writing. For the modern day urbanized reader access to the
natural environment is inhibited both physically and semiotically
through negligence and lack of knowledge about nature’s forms of
being, various signs, and communication processes within it. In such a
situation the nature writing that presupposes competence of inter-
preting and relating two types of text — written text and textual
natural environment — remains feasible to few readers. Works of
nature writing become closed texts and common consciousness of
culture ignores them as unimportant or nonexistent. At the same time
the writers and readers of nature writing form a small but quite well
established and homogeneous group (for instance in the Estonian
tradition there are a few authors, who, besides nature essays, also
write belles-lettres). In addition to attachment to nature, also the
mutually supporting effect of the two types of text may contribute to
the formation of such a group — nature writing leads readers to
experience nature directly without any literary mediation, and personal
nature experiences of individuals direct them back to nature writing to
find out about similar experiences of other people.
Conclusions
An important background and support for developing ecosemiotic

views is the understanding that the ecological approach itself is not
alien to semiotics, but is in fact present in the foundations of
semiotics. Besides explicitly ecosemiotic writings, the communication
models by Roman Jakobson and Thomas A. Sebeok, the contextual
thinking of Gregory Bateson and works of authors of language
philosophy and translation studies can also turn out to be useful for
enriching semiotics with the ecological perspective.
Ecosemiotic itself has several roots and interpretations. The most
important of these are biological and cultural ecosemiotics that follow
the dividing line between American pragmatist semiotics and Euro-
pean semiology. As ecosemiotics endeavors to study both semiosic
activity in nature and its cultural representations, this divide becomes
290 Timo Maran
particularly distressing. Riste Keskpaik has described the main goal of

ecosemiotics as solving communication problems between humans
and nature. This essential task can only be fulfilled if ecosemiotics
studies nature’s representations in culture, semiosic activities as they
take place in nature itself, and what may be most important, pays
attention to the ways how these two are interrelated. The present
article discusses the possibilities for using the legacy of Tartu–
Moscow semiotic school for developing ecosemiotics. The concept of
nature-text is introduced as a methodological possibility to overcome
the gap between cultural and biological ecosemiotics. Describing the
ways in which nature is represented in culture in the same framework
with semiosic activities of nature itself may help us to pinpoint the
problems in our communicative relations with it, and maybe even
explicate possibilities for the restoration of concordance.15
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К проблеме синтеза методологии экосемиотики:

понятие текста природы
Цель статьи — разработка экосемиотики в плане практического ме-

тода анализа. Для этого сначала рассматривается связь значения и
контекста как имманентно содержащаяся в семиотике возможность
экосемиотического подхода,. Затем анализируются разные перспек-
тивы в экосемиотике с помощью описания биологической и культур-
ной экосемиотики и критического перечитывания трудов Винфрида
Нёта и Калеви Кулля. Автор подчеркивает необходимость комбини-
рования этих экосемиотических подходов таким образом, чтобы
возникающий синтез как учитывал семиотичность самой природы,
так и умел анализировать изображение природы в написанных текс-
тах. Для этого создается модель текста природы, которая объединяет
написанный текст и природное окружение, связанные между собой
механизмом означивания. Для поддержки концепции текста приро-
294 Timo Maran
ды приводятся описания текста семиотиками Тартуско-Московской

школы, которые достаточно широки, чтобы охватить семиотическую
активность и созидание среды не только человека, но и других
живых существ. В конце статьи концепция текста природы исполь-
зуется для определения понятия «литературы, описывающей приро-
ду» в качестве признания человеком чуждой ему семиотической
сферы и для объяснения маргинальности литературы о природе,
обосновывая это необходимостью интерпретации двух разных типов
текстов.
Ökosemiootika metodoloogia sünteesi poole: loodusteksti mõiste
Artikli eesmärgiks on ökosemiootika edendamine praktilise analüüsi-

meetodi suunas. Selleks tutvustatakse esmalt tähenduse ja konteksti seost
kui semiootikas immanentselt sisalduvat võimalust ökoloogiliseks vaa-
teks. Seejärel analüüsitakse erinevaid perspektiive ökosemiootikas, kirjel-
dades bioloogilist ja kultuurilist ökosemiootikat ning lugedes kriitiliselt
W. Nöthi ja K. Kulli käsitlusi. Autor rõhutab vajadust kombineerida neid
ökosemiootilisi lähenemisi viisil, et tekkiv süntees arvestaks ühtaegu nii
looduse enda semiootilisust kui suudaks ka analüüsida looduse kujutamist
kirjutatud tekstides. Selle eesmärgi täitmiseks tutvustatakse loodusteksti
mudelit, mis ühendab kahte tähendusseoste läbi seotud osapoolt —
kirjutatud teksti ja looduskeskkonda. Loodusteksti kontseptsiooni toe-
tuseks tutvustatakse Tartu–Moskva koolkonna semiootikute tekstikäsit-
lusi, mis on piisavalt avarad hõlmamaks peale inimeste ka teiste elus-
olendite semiootilist aktiivsust ja keskkonnaloomet. Artikli lõpus kasuta-
takse loodusteksti kontseptsiooni, et määratleda looduskirjandust kui
inimese jaoks võõrsemiootilise sfääri tunnustust ning selgitada loodus-
kirjanduse marginaalsust, põhjendades seda kahe eri tekstitüübi inter-
pretatsioonivajadusega.
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Sign Systems Studies 35.

Abstract. The aim of the article is to elaborate ecosemiotics towards practical

For understanding the paradigm of ecosemiotics and its methodolo-

twentieth century science. Also cybernetics, general systems theory,

recipient, context, channel, etc.) to be “semiotic resources” (Posner

Contextualism as a common ground

An interesting semiotic concept regarding relations to ecology is

message transmitted in communication is directed outside of the

From another angle Eugene Nida has emphasized the importance of

involving cultural values, context of a source text, etc. (Nida 2001:

1972b: 15; Sebeok 1972b: 80). According to Sebeok, contextual infor-

Different perspectives in ecosemiotics

approach proceeds from the tradition of general semiotics of Charles

Many other authors have used a semiotic approach in ecological

Is it always of a semiotic nature, or is there at least always a semiotic aspect in

In a later article, Winfried Nöth specifies the position of ecosemiotics

(2) Kull defines ecosemiotics explicitly “as a part of the semiotics of

themselves are limited in their ability to describe culture-nature

text and culture with his/her participation as a living being in the

Nature-text as a methodological concept for ecosemiotics

On the level of practical analysis the necessity to integrate two

following a nature trail), but there is hardly one-to-one correspon-

Figure 1. Nature writing conceptualized as nature-text: components and inter-

In order to appear and become related with nature writing, the

Arguments for including natural environment

Such a theoretical approach to nature writing may raise questions as to

school not much attention was paid to the natural environment.

could also be the best proof that, at least in Estonian culture, it is

utterances circulating in a collective but not understood by it are attributed

Natural environment is similar to foreign cultural texts, which are

modern literary theory the position of author is anyhow blurred and

school has considered natural language to be the primary modeling

Nature writing as regarded through

If we agree with the arguments given above that it is reasonable to

During each writing act choices are made among alternative

altogether, then many meaning connections that point in the written

An important background and support for developing ecosemiotic

particularly distressing. Riste Keskpaik has described the main goal of

Hornborg, Alf 2001. Vital signs: An ecosemiotic perspective on the human

К проблеме синтеза методологии экосемиотики:

Цель статьи — разработка экосемиотики в плане практического ме-

ды приводятся описания текста семиотиками Тартуско-Московской

Ökosemiootika metodoloogia sünteesi poole: loodusteksti mõiste

Artikli eesmärgiks on ökosemiootika edendamine praktilise analüüsi-

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